by | Jul 25, 2024 | Nutrition
Like the tobacco industry adding extra nicotine to cigarettes, the food industry employs taste engineers to accomplish a similar goal of maximizing the irresistibility of its products. The plague of tobacco deaths wasn’t due just to the mass manufacturing and...
by | Jul 23, 2024 | Nutrition
The power of the “eat more” food environment can overcome our conscious controls. Food and beverage companies frame body weight as “a matter of personal choice.” Even when we aren’t distracted, the power of the “eat more” food environment may sometimes overcome our...
by | Jul 18, 2024 | Nutrition
We all like to think we make important life decisions, like what to eat, consciously and rationally, but if that were the case, we wouldn’t be in the midst of an obesity epidemic. The opening words of the Institute of Medicine’s report on the potential threat posed by...
by | Jul 16, 2024 | Nutrition
The unprecedented rise in the power, scope, and sophistication of food marketing starting around 1980 aligns well with the blastoff slope of the obesity epidemic. In the 1970s, the U.S. government went from just subsidizing some of the worst foods to paying companies...
by | Jul 11, 2024 | Nutrition
Why are U.S. taxpayers giving billions of dollars to support the likes of the sugar and meat industries? The rise in calorie surplus sufficient to explain the obesity epidemic was less a change in food quantity than in food quality. Access to cheap, high-calorie,...
by | Jul 9, 2024 | Nutrition
The rise in the U.S. calorie supply responsible for the obesity epidemic wasn’t just about more food, but a different kind of food. The rise in the number of calories provided by the food supply since the 1970s “is more than sufficient to explain the US epidemic of...
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